Building Ceiling

“It appears the Giants have touched all the bases with this revised project,” Agnos said. “And those bases are: reasonable heights, increased affordable housing, open space and neighborhood-serving retail to bring some spark to what is an unfinished neighborhood. Assuming all this bears out in the writing of the measure, I think they have done a terrific job of revising the project.”

Just to fill the existing deficit, the Building Industry Association of the Bay Area, which represents home builders, projects that the region should be permitting 2,224 units per month on average, or about 27,000 per year.

Miami took the opposite approach: it provided a larger area for new growth which it has enjoyed while keeping it's cultural communities. New people will move to the city, shutting them out doesn't work for either group.

Over the past two decades, San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period
—The San Francisco Exodus

The problem is that San Francisco won’t build housing, and making matters worse, residents work tirelessly to prevent more housing from being built.

…let’s look at what San Francisco has in fact built. Not very much! Between 2005 and 2015, San Francisco (city/county) added 26,770 new units, according to housing permits data provided by Trulia. That’s one-quarter of the housing units built in the San Francisco metro area, one-half of what was built in the San Jose metro area, and just 17 percent of the total units across the entire Bay Area. Sad.

Lack of built-out Suburbs

The growth of new housing has slowed way down. A lot of the pressure would come off San Francisco if outlying cities would allow growth. Instead, most suburbs fall victim to the NIMBY syndrome.

This leaves the city in a cycle of ever increasing rents. As richer people move into higher priced homes, the slightly less rich move to slightly cheaper housing slightly further from the city center. This forces the even less rich to move further out.

As the central circles of housing fill with increasingly richer populations, the less rich are forced to move further out. The upper classes in the middle of the city then want to keep their high-rent quaint 3-story Victorians instead of building large apartments. Which perpetuates the cycle.

A Few Concrete Things To Do

Without a solution, San Francisco rents are going to remain outrageous. Already, I see people moving away from the city to live in surrounding areas and commuting into the city. While some of this is inevitable, Oakland is a major city in its own right, and it has reasonable rents, and is on the upswing.